‘Iv’

Really, really like the look of this. New York City is my favourite place on Earth so far, and this doesn’t just look like it, it feels like it. Of course, my favourite thing about NYC is that the people are a) diverse and b) frequently shockingly nice, and the defining feature of the 3D GTA games has been that the people in them are a) a handful of clones and b) incessently and predictably hateful. So that’s probably not going to work out.

But this is the first time since we were last in Liberty City that a GTA game hasn’t been garish. It looks serious, sombre. Try to picture a Vice City or San Andreas trailer with that music. This looks majestic. However amateurish the combat and missions have been in GTA games, the one thing they do with professional aplomb is storytelling. If they’re choosing to tell the story of a slave-trading (bride-selling?) Russian immigrant, they’ll tell it with the appropriate gravity.

They told Vice City’s Scarface tale with appropriate style, and San Andreas’s homecoming with appropriate attitude. But in Vice City I was a mealy-mouthed prick, and in San Andreas I was a sad, stupid little man. If I can’t be the mute blank slate in a leather jacket I was in GTA3, a depressed and amoral Eastern European is still a dramatic step up.

13 Replies to “‘Iv’”

I want to play this more than any other game I’ve ever wanted to play. This’ll be the reaosn I finally pick up a 360 or PS3 and the decision which will be exclusively based upon which version is the stronger product. There’s some discussion going on regarding the finer details of the trailer over on Preys-World, if you’re at all interested:

I want to play this more than any other game I’ve ever wanted to play. This’ll be the reason I finally pick up a 360 or PS3 and the decision which will be exclusively based upon which version is the stronger product. There’s some discussion going on regarding the finer details of the trailer over on Preys-World, if you’re at all interested:

I want to play this more than any other game I’ve ever wanted to play. This’ll be the reaosn I finally pick up a 360 or PS3 and the decision which will be exclusively based upon which version is the stronger product.

But then Tim’s joke wouldn’t work. And if I deleted that, I’d have to delete your response to it, and this response to that. It would be a catastrophic deletion-cascade. Tell you what, I’ll fix one of the ‘reaosn’s.

Why the delerium, anyway? Did you prefer the previous GTA games to the Half-Life games?

You know, I was pointing the exact same thing out to my flatmates today: this does appear to be the first GTA game that doesn’t seem as “cartoonish” as the others. On one hand, it makes me slightly excited to see the series grow up.

On the other hand. Well, we already have the NYC politicians up in arms for no real reason already. I think that speaks for itself.

Needless to say it’s a difficult comparison. I’ve never made it a secret that I’m fanboy-mad about both, although if I was put back in time 8 years and someone told me you can either play no Half-Life games from now on or no more GTA games, I’d not hesitate to wave Gordon off. I love GTA’s ‘make your own fun’ freedom, its sense of humour, its scope, the cars (their variety, how they handle … as a car nut, I’m especially about the cars). There’s so much about it that I love and so often I could keep returning to it, if only I had the ocean of available time required. As great as Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are, the things they’re good at are far fewer in number and the amount of entertainment that you can reasonably draw from them is far less, in my own experience at least.

I feel pretty safe saying that when I play Episode Two, I’ll love it for its 6-hour duration and will be satisfied when it’s over but I know that when I play GTA IV, I will love it even more and for months.

Also, speaking of IV specifically, it looks especially incredible. Liberty City, and by extension GTA 3 as a whole, was comfortably my favourite of the post-GTA 2 GTAs, and as you’ve explained well yourself, this looks, by quite a long way, even better – “majestic”. Also, whilst I wasn’t immediately sure what I made of the character, an Eastern European ex-human-trafficker is intriguing enough for me to have faith in Rockstar North that they’ll be able to do his story justice.Basically, I just think this game has massive potential based on that teaser and what excites me is that it’s RN who’ll be exploring it.

I’m sure they’ll fix the combat, it’s been on the critical nag list since GTA III and if they don’t get it right this time (despite the fact that similar games since like Saints Row and Crackdown have also got it wrong) then I don’t see Rockstar’s critical cadre remaining entirely positive.

I don’t think the characters in previous games were clones – unless you’re talking about the pedestrians, etc, which was surely only a technical neccesity. The speaking cast of all the GTAs have been witty and vibrant like no other series. Uniformly hateful, perhaps, but that’s the particular slice of life it’s trying to portray, and I’m sure that however amazing NYC is it has just the same amount of hate in it as anywhere else.

I think that the gaming public (and surely yourself) is easily able to distinguish between real life NYC and Rockstars own inflected Liberty City version. It has always been based on it, and bared a strong resemblence, and I think now that they have the hardware to do it justice, they’re going for an even more accurate take on it because this can only allow them more accurate satire, which is ultimately their game.

It’s the right time to get serious, and I’m pretty sure they’ll do it without disrespecting anyone or thing that doesn’t deserve it.